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MCCARTHYISM AND THE MATHEMATIZATION OF ECONOMICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2017

E. Roy Weintraub
E. Roy Weintraub*
Affiliation:
Emeritus Professor of Economics, Duke University, erw@duke.edu.
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Abstract

Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists’ engagements with other disciplines—e.g., mathematics, statistics, operations research, physics, engineering, cybernetics—during and immediately after World War II. More controversially, some historians have also argued that the transformation was accelerated by economists’ desires to be safe, to seek the protective coloration of mathematics and statistics, during the McCarthy period. This paper argues that that particular claim 1) is generally accepted, but 2) is unsupported by good evidence, and 3) what evidence there is suggests that the claim is false.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , December 2017 , pp. 571 - 597
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2017 

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